70 years ago: FDR’s corrupt attorney general

Each Monday, we turn to a day in the newspaper’s history for a look at what the Editorial Board found worthy of comment. We will preserve the punctuation and capitalization of the original editorial column. Below is an editorial from Sept. 30, 1944:

‘Cleared with Sidney’ ...

Since the president ordered his party, at Chicago, to “clear everything with Sidney,” it comes as no great suprise that the president’s attorney general, Mr. Biddle, finds that Sidney Hillman’s CIO-PAC, which has set out to buy the fourth term with a slush fund of up to six million dollars, wrung from CIO union members at $1 a head, is not in violation of the corrupt practices act. When the complaint was filed against the CIO-PAC it was a foregone conclusion that Biddle would so decide.

Biddle’s ruling is satisfactory to the department of justice, and of course to the New Deal in general. no doubt if the matter could be taken to the courts, 80 per cent of whose judges have been selected under the New Deal, the ruling would be upheld.

But the final court in this country is the judgment of the people. Biddle may have ruled to suit the administration. But it remains to be proved that he has ruled to suit the people. (...)

When Biddle distorts the facts to rule that “it seems clear that the persons now making individual contributions to the national citizens political action committee are not labor organizations,” he isn’t kidding anybody. The members of the NCPAC are practically identical with labor union personnel. The funds come from union treasuries and union membership. The CIO political action committee is bossed by CIO big shots, who remain on the union payrolls. Nobody denies this. (...)

In the primaries, under a transparent Biddle ruling that the corrupt practices act’s provisions applied only to elections, and not to primaries — as if a primary election was not an election! — the CIO-PAC was completely shameless and open about the barrel. It simply muleted the unions and spent the money in behalf of its favorites and against those on its purge list.

Biddle didn’t fool anybody, though, least of all the voters.

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